The education that prevents human failure . . .
The Whole Human Ecology Idea
Recently, and finally, America has realized that what you learn before you start school casts the dye for your whole life and how you approach the world around you. Your cultural intelligence is set by age nine, and if your experiences at home, family, and school were not the best, by the time you reach high school, your views of your life and environment have become difficult to change. The key to Human Ecology education is to give people all the information and help they need early on to understand how to make informed decisions and manage their lives. That management task scales up as students mature and face more complex social systems and more intricate and often biased interactions at home and at work. Human Ecology is understanding the relationship between you and the natural, social, and built environments of your life.
Signs of human failure are all around us now: food insecurity, more homeless people, shortened lifespans, youth suicides, bankruptcies, chronic poor health, obesity, and more. They are all related and are the fallout of the missing education to understand, navigate, and plan a healthy life. The mistaken assumption has been that professional education will solve the problem. That thinking has prioritized career prep in schools for decades, yet human failures grow. We have learned, unfortunately, that it is not all about money, and careers can change fast or disappear. Human problems have become more acute as social and natural environments change too rapidly and become too complex for too many people, including children, to understand and adapt, yet it is too late once they are adults; the damage is done. This social decline is why Human Ecology programs have now become the critical missing element in most schools. Empowering people with life knowledge and skills prevents the decisions and conditions that lead to human failure and enables young people to anticipate and participate proactively in change as it occurs in their lives.
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How can you define yourself if you cannot define what is around you and how you live? How can you see yourself, believe yourself to be authentic, and know your uniqueness if you cannot understand the human ecosystem you live in? Maturity is learned.
It takes fifteen years, K-14.
WHAT PEOPLE SAY
Zak Stein
If education is not the answer, you are asking the wrong question - why it's time to see planetary crises as a species-wide learning opportunity.
Jonathan Haidt
Cultural norms and culturally shaped emotions have a substantial impact on the domain of morality and processor of moral judgment.
Claudia Goldin
When couple equity is abandoned, gender equality in the workplace tends to follow.
Robert Kennedy
“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.”
Sandra F.
Ericson, MA
Chair, Department of Consumer Arts & Science, (Ret.), City College of San Francisco
CCSF is an inner-city community college where people start out and start over in San Francisco. It's your first stop if you're lower income, have dependents, need to work, or maybe your culture and the mainstream ...
